Categories

The Categories page manages income and expense category groups, the categories inside them, visibility, and hierarchy. It shares the master-data editing model — this page covers what’s specific to categories.

Open Categories from the Data Management section of the sidebar.

What you get beyond Actual Budget

Import/export the entire group hierarchy as CSV — seed a whole budget’s category structure from a spreadsheet in one pass, or export it for backup.
Cascade-aware group deletion — deleting a group shows the child-category count and aggregated transactions across all children, with a cascade warning, before anything is staged.
See which rules reference a category and jump straight to them.
Notes on category groups, not just categories.

Groups and categories

Create category groups (income or expense type) and categories within them.
Rename groups and categories inline; collapse or expand group rows (or all groups at once).
Group reassignment opens an on-demand editor rather than rendering every dropdown up front, keeping large tables responsive.

Hide, show, and delete

Toggle visibility (hidden / visible) per category or per whole group.
Deleting a category confirms with its transaction count and rule references. Deleting a group additionally shows the child category count and aggregated transactions across all children, with a cascade warning. Bulk delete deduplicates implicit deletions and aggregates the totals.

Filter and sort

Filter by name, type (income / expense / all), and visibility (visible / hidden / all). Sort by name.

Notes

Each category and group row has a note button. Read, add, edit, or clear notes inline — they save immediately, independent of staged category edits.

Import and export

Export or import the full group hierarchy as CSV (staged before saving). CSV columns:

type (group or category, required), name (required), group, is_income, hidden.
Group rows must appear before the categories that reference them.

Common problems

“Can’t move an income category” — income categories are locked to the income group.
A group delete warns loudly — it cascades to child categories; read the aggregated impact first.
Imported categories landed ungrouped — check that each group row appears above its categories in the CSV.

Managing your data — the shared editing model
Budget Management — budget the categories you create here
Rules — how rules reference categories